Page 28 - Studio International - May 1972

`a world of human types, which at its most inhabited the films of this period : how 'chaos which will no longer permit the masses to be
concentrated becomes the interior of the mind'.9 resembles a whirlpool' in Caligari; of the silent spectators, which will not only excite
In the twenties, the 'machine-made' look was importance of staircases —of the jessnertreppen them inwardly but will let them take hold and
especially potent as both a topical and a and their successors; of silhouette and relief participate—actually allow them to fuse with the
`universal' sign. Schlemmer wrote that stylization in Destiny; how lighting became a action of the stage at the peak of cathartic
abstraction and mechanization were the two raumgestaltender Faktor and geometric ecstasy."5 If Schlemmer created a kind of
most striking 'emblems' of his present groupings of figures created heraldic fictive display stand for depersonalised action
time; and these two factors conveniently compositions; of Expressionist obliques, (and Lang, too, for in the film the spectator is
summarise his art. For though he was deeply rhetorical symmetries, and soon. It is not my not present), Moholy's ambition was to construct
committed to the machine age he was, in basis, intention here to amplify such description. It is a behavioural-environmental space within
involved in a traffic with epistemologies which worth noting, however, that the importance which group action would be enforced by
the topical merely rendered the more accessible. given to forms in space places German film- synesthetic stimuli. But this ambition was never
That this was possible speaks volumes for the makers of the twenties in the tradition of properly realized; nor could be, in fact, within
optimism of twenties modernists. And while creators of 'fictions', in the specialized sense of an exclusively artistic framework. To find
the stylization of humanity into controlling the term as used by Bentham to denote an consummate examples of mass theatre around
Übermenschen and manipulated Untermenschen entity created 'by the grammatical form of the this period, we would need to turn to the
remained in the realms of fiction this optimism discourse employed in speaking of it'. That is, politicised dramas of Soviet Russia.16 Here,
could continue. they are purveyors of invented structures which Evreinov's re-enacted storming of the Winter
though so evidently 'unreal' assert their Palace and Meyerhold's proletarian pageant, the
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3 verisimilitude, as if they were real. Khodinskaia Field project, are especially
Suspension of disbelief is really an aspect of a In Metropolis, Lang created a patently significant in that they presage a later German
suspension of cerebration, or what Wagner artificial space—through science-fiction type theatricalisation of daily life and, specifically,
more precisely called an 'emotionalizing of the settings—and within it deployed a series of two forms of spectacle, namely Hitler's various
intellect'.10 This is, of course, something on equally unreal aesthetic form composed of reconstructions of the historical and what could
which all theatrical arts depend; but can at people and props. This accentuation of dramatic be called his Nuremburg Field event (as filmed
times take on a deeper and more formative artifice—its very 'contrived' character — is, of by Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will). But
function. course, its formative purpose. It persuades (for National Socialism was not without its own
For Wagner, the intellect was emotionalized it is a propagandist film—and a reactionary heritage in this respect, one which lacked the
in the uniting of poetry and music through the one at that) that form constitutes reality, and hated machinist trappings. In 1907, Ernst
medium of a pre-rational 'tone-speech'. erects by means of form a 'clear' (though Wachler had founded an open-air Mountain
Ever since his premonition of the arbitrary) structure to assist the mastering of Theatre in the Harz to present not dramas as
Gesamtkunstwerk the idea of creating a experience—though its emblems and devices such, but to be 'a stage for cults' wherein
contrapuntal alliance of the arts grew in are themselves as far from experientality as Volkish doxologies could dramatize not the
importance; for it was believed that emotional those of geometry itself. As Neil Kleinman has modern world but the ancient German
effect increased in proportion to the number of written of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will Weltanschauung.
artistic stimuli. And since the notion of (which depends so much on Metropolis): 'The
totality overlaps that of environmental mastery awareness of "unreality" engendered by the 4
it was not surprising that Weimar modernists German propagandists is an awareness that Brecht's Baal of 1918 tells through allegory
turned their thoughts in this direction. If this springs from a consciousness of forms. It is an of the loneliness of the thinker in modern
total mastery was never quite achieved, awareness that fortifies the belief in a reality civilisation and in the jungle of its cities. Ten
nevertheless an overlapping of genres was an which exists only when it can be examined as years later, however, his 'Threepenny Opera'
important characteristic of the advanced art of form. This is to subscribe to a reality that is all was condemned by the Völkischer
this period. Neue Sachlichkeit painting was composition, all structure. But this kind of Beobachter for its seeming celebration of the
allied to reporting, the 'new architecture' to awareness, rather than diminishing the sense of primitivism in metropolitan existence, of 'the
abstract painting, and the film was ever a reality, reasserts it all the more.'14 The moral cesspool found in some form in every
`theatrical' medium. Central to all this was the sublimation of perceptual reality to that large city'.17 Two points are involved: the
idea of creating a 'proper' environment: created by the medium of its representation modernists' environmental unease being
realist painters turned to the documentary so (which, of course, is part of any mimetic art) conquered by their pursuance of primitivism
as to expose its deficiencies, architects assumed came here to insist that what is clearest is most and iconoclasm and their admiration for social
that they were also designing social real. Such an affirmation created order levelling and the urban proletariat— all of
relationships, and film-makers made man in his through generalization or `abstraction'; and which were associated with the metropolis.
environment their central theme—though here the accumulation of specific detailing which Secondly, the German traditionalists' antagonism
both man and environment were equally characterizes Metropolis serves in no way to toward these same factors for their
stylized so as to accentuate their reciprocity. In reinforce individuality, but to reinforce form. incompatibility with true `Germanness'. These
1927, Lang wrote of his belief that designed That is, it cannot provide a picture of empirical points are linked, however, in an often-made
environment would go far to support the reality for the 'reality' here is founded in antithesis of this period, that of 'Community'
actor's — or man's —role : abstraction and stereotype. Details function versus 'Civilization'.
`The actor will no longer stand in an as statistical substances filling out generalities. The vocabulary of this dispute has its
environment in which he seems to have been Lang, as a machine-age artificer, framed his origins in Ferdinand Tönnies' book of 1887,
put by accident : but the environment will be (un)reality in terms of masses in motion. For Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which
designed in such a way that the development him, there could be no possibility of the intimate contrasted the authentic creativity and organic
of the person in it is possible and appears theatricality that Schlemmer used. For harmony of 'community' with the materialist
logical. An expression of great subtlety will Schlemmer's colleague, Moholy-Nagy, any and mechanistic fragmentation of business
unite environment, requisite and plot.' 11 kind of intimacy, any 'picture-framing', `society'. Tönnies' ideas are of course but part
Much has been written, most notably by inhibited the full exploitation of the theatrical. of the wider aspects of `Volkish' theory ; 18
Kracauer and Eisner,12 about the kinds of form Instead, he desired a 'total' theatre, a and though the fierce chauvinism of that theory
—both fabricated and real—which defined and Gesamtbuhnenaktion, 'a kind of stage activity might have supported industrialism and

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